


Tale of the Traitors

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 06:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11503851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: It's not that easy for Spencer to adjust after events of the finale.





	Tale of the Traitors

In the initial moments after she was reunited with Toby and with her friends, after Alex was taken away, Spencer was just relieved to be back with her friends and family again. Then a lot of her time was taken up with helping Aria and Ezra to rearrange their cancelled wedding, and she didn’t have much time to think about everything else.

But once the excitement of the wedding had died down, Spencer found herself dwelling on everything that had happened with Alex, of all the times Alex had impersonated her with her loved ones and no one had had any clue. She could understand Hanna dismissing it as a hallucination when Alex had appeared to her during her kidnap, in the circumstances. Maybe Ezra at the airport since he’d really only seen Alex for a couple of minutes. But the rest of the times? All those times with Toby?

At first she had naturally assumed that Toby had figured out on his own that there was something off about the girl he had thought was Spencer. Then Jenna had mentioned something about how she had made the call to Toby, telling him she didn’t think the Spencer standing in front of her was the real one. So Jenna, someone Spencer wasn’t even friends with, had been the first one to notice, while people who were supposedly so much closer to Spencer than Jenna was, her friends, her ex boyfriend, had been quite happy to accept Alex as Spencer? Yes, people had come to her afterwards and mentioned little things that had seemed unusual, like her mother saying she had never heard Spencer refer to her as a rock star, but did no one other than Jenna really make the leap to it not being Spencer?

She’d tried telling herself there was no reason for anyone to know. It wasn’t as if any of her friends, or Toby, had known that Spencer had an identical twin. Even their father hadn’t known until after it all came out. How could anyone have been expected to guess? To paraphrase that stupid duck saying, you’d expect that if it looked like Spencer, walked like Spencer and talked like Spencer, it was Spencer. Part of her was saying she shouldn’t be too hard on Toby.

But at the same time, she couldn’t help but ask herself, how could anyone not have suspected anything? How much longer could it have gone on for? Okay, so Wren and Charlotte had told Alex enough stuff that Alex could pass herself off as Spencer, but surely one day Toby, or Emily, or Melissa, anyone who was an important part of her life, would have referenced some conversation or incident from long ago, something Wren and Charlotte would never have known about, or wouldn’t have thought it was significant enough, to repeat to Alex? Surely then, once Alex didn’t understand the reference that Spencer would have, someone would have wondered?

Spencer wasn’t sure what Alex would have worn of hers during the time she was masquerading as her. In the end, it was just easier for her to wash everything, to clean her room from top to bottom, in the hope of ridding herself of any traces that Alex had ever been there. But she couldn’t do that with her family, she couldn’t scrub all traces of Alex from Toby (who had talked of how he had stood under the shower for hours, trying to scrub himself clean of her). Spencer would look at him, and imagine his hands running through Alex’s hair, imagine her lying next to him in bed, and it made her want to scream.

 

Alex had said to Spencer about how she wanted to know what it felt like having a family and friends who loved her. But Alex had had that, with Wren, Charlotte and Dunhill. Spencer knew she shouldn’t torture herself by asking this question, but she found herself wondering whether those three would have picked up on it sooner had the roles been reversed and Spencer had taken Alex’s place. Since then, Spencer had also found herself wondering what her life would have been like if her parents had brought Alex home too, brought them up as twins. Would she have been close to Alex, or would they have been rivals as she and Melissa had once been? Would the problems Mary had referred to that led to the breakdown of her adoptive placement have still manifested? If that had happened, one thing Spencer was confident of was that Peter and Veronica Hastings would still have accepted Alex as part of the family rather than writing her out of history like the DiLaurentises had done to Charlotte.

She’d get past it, maybe talk things through with Dr Sullivan, move on and rebuild her relationships with her family, with her friends, even with Toby. They loved her; they had no way of knowing it was Alex they were interacting with as they had no way of knowing Alex even existed. Spencer had to keep reminding herself of that, so she could move forward with them all, get on with her life.

“Sometimes, Alex,” she whispered in her darker moments, “I wonder the same thing as you.”


End file.
